 | Graduate student Erica Conners chats with David Weinstein, executive vice president of Fidelity Investments, following his presentation on “Ethics and Corporate Governance.”
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Fidelity exec tells why ethics matterThe corporate scandals that have made front page news across the country have shaken Americans’ trust in corporate institutions, corporate leaders, the professions of accounting and law, and even in the government agencies that are supposed to oversee them, a Fidelity Investments executive said during a September program at URI.
“I have to tell you as an executive at Fidelity Investments, the world’s largest mutual fund company and as the chairman of Fidelity’s Ethics Committee, I’ve watched all of this with great disappointment and with outrage,” said Executive Vice President David Weinstein. “From the headlines I have seen even this week, this vicious storm is still swirling all around us.”
While in the middle of the storm, Weinstein said there are only two productive actions to take. “The first is to try to learn from the mistakes that we’ve made, and the second is to learn how to improve our systems,” he told a crowd of URI professors, administrators and students. “I also take a lot of solace in looking at recent events that the system fundamentally does work. The stock market punishes companies that lie or cheat or aren’t honest with their customers or shareholders, eventually.”
The ethical firms attract capital and retain customers, and in the long term, are the ones that will outperform the companies that cut corners, Weinstein said. “I think we can demonstrate that good ethics leads to good business.”
Weinstein told the group how Fidelity “bakes ethics” into the organization.
“We have 30,000 employees in nine different states around the country, and we haven’t changed one bit since the day we were founded in 1946. Leadership starts at the top, and the way we bake values in is by the example of our corporate leaders. And it’s not what we say, it’s what we do, how we act.”
He said Fidelity has a code of ethics that covers business practices, but it also covers personal transactions. “We have a value statement and we publish it. The number one value at Fidelity is honesty and integrity in everything we do. And when we hire people, including 160 URI alumni, we do background checks, we fingerprint people because they are handling other people’s money. It’s easy to figure out what someone’s GPA is or what their class rank is. It’s a lot harder to really understand if the person walking in the door at Fidelity has integrity. But the first day on the job, every one of our employees goes through an orientation. And we have a senior manager who talks about our values, talks about honesty and makes it relevant to their particular jobs. And every year we have a code of ethics class that all employees are required to go to.”
By Dave Lavallee
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